Annihilation in the Poems of Sylvia PlathIn this chapter I have attempted to give a historical overview of the European-American tradition of confessional poetry and analyse the poems of Sylvia Plath as outcomes of this tradition. In the main, Plath’s poems seem to embody the dichotomy between life and death. After examining Plath’s attitude to suicide as well as the major themes and motifs of her work, I have tried to enunciate, what I feel, is her philosophy of life – an intense awareness of pain and suffering and a sense of doom brought on by an indifferent cosmic order resulting in despair that she constantly tried to fight.The confessional poets chiefly employ the self as a sole poetic symbol. They are artists whose total mythology is the lost self. A confessional poem is surely not a mere recitation of losses or facts. Nor should the facts displayed be taken for literal truth. Nevertheless, the confessional poem is in someway a declaration of dependence or guilt, anguish and suffering. Thus, the writing of each such poem is an ego-centered, though not an egocentric act; its goal is self-therapy and certain purgation.1 A confession is a kind of disclosure linked with autobiography very closely in its literary application. In confessional literature we may place works which comprise a very personal and subjective account of experiences, beliefs, feelings, ideas and states of mind, body and soul. It may be a misleading and flexible term which suggests an autobiographical literature, written in the first person, and which on the face of it, is self-revelation. On the other hand, it may not be though it looks like it. The author may be merely assuming the role of another character. Roy Pascal has suggested that autobiography is a creation of European civilization and it really begins with Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine conceives life as a process, an endless sequence of affirmations and negations. He addresses himself to such basic questions as the cause of sin, the reality of evil and the nature of faith because his mind operates in an existential framework underlying which is the dialectics of the self’s evolution.With Rousseau the tradition of confessional literature underwent a significant transformation. As Northrop Frye says: “After Rousseau- in fact in Rousseau- the confession flows into the novel, and the mixture produces the fictional autobiography, and kindred types.”2 Thus in the nineteenth century we have the personal novel as a distinct genre branching out from the confessional tradition, while the confessions in prose became a major form in the Romantic literature of the period. Romanticism, with its inherent beliefs in the significance of personal experience asserted the claims of the subjective self. The Romantic impulse and the autobiographical tradition merge in the best works of the period, as in Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” or the novels of Dickens and the Brontes exploring childhood experiences. Wordsworth’s an autobiographical poet who creates values out of experience and constructs a unique pattern of meaningful events out of the chaos of memory. As Roy Pascal puts it, “Wordsworth is the first autobiographer to realize… that the deepest purpose of autobiography is the account of a life as a projection of the real self…on the world. “3 The confessional poet’s preoccupation with extreme mental states sets him apart from the Romantic poet who, often, is lost in his personal complaints in the music of forlornness. The central experience of a confessional poem is psychological since the poet examines the psychic disintegration, which results, when the self rejects established norms of judgment. The confessional poet’s sense of guilt appears to spring from his inability to adopt the role prescribed by his culture. His rebellion against establishment unleashes violence in his own self and, in some cases, precipitates neurosis. The confessional poets thus explore that domain of experience in their poetry where the self is confronted in a destructive landscape of passion and paranoia. Their concerns, though personal in essence, belong to the contemporary period in their broader framework and amount to an intensification of certain elements inherited in the confessional tradition in literature.Confessional poetry may be something in the nature of a spiritual odyssey or a quest for salvation; or an exercise in self-exploration, or self-revelation, even it may be a striving towards rejection or annihilation. It may be any or all of these, or it may be something else: what is, however, of importance, a narcissistic quality, a sort of bumptiousness, the ingredient of aggressive egocentricity in the character of the confessional poets that vitiate their writings.One of the major developments in American literature in the second half of the twentieth century was the rise of the confessional poem and the confessional poet. As life grew more complex , its literature grew more complex too. Multiple marriages and miscarriages, war atrocities and suicides were as valid subjects for the poet as a perfect rose or a perfect lady. There were, after all, more police sirens than Grecian Urns in the house; more smoke stacks than yew trees on the horizon. It was obvious that the poet would include pain, misery, anguish, and ugliness at the cost of pleasure, delight and beauty. The mental disorders necessitating frequent hospitalization problems connected with divorce and new marriages and extra-marital affairs expressed the crises in American Civilization which is evident in the poetic creations of Sylvia Plath and other confessional poets. As a genre confessional poetry has become a potent force in the literary history of America. Various poets and writers like Robert Lowell, Kunitz, Jarrell, Roethke, Sexton, Snodgrass, Plath and Berryman have all been recipients of Pulitzer prizes and National Book Awards for confessional mode of writing.Robert Phillips, author of The Confessional Poets, called the time the great ‘Age of Autobiography,’ as we no longer seem to believe in the general truth about human nature, only the subjective ones, and our writers began to cry out their own stories. Poets write out of a need to purge their deepest feelings, not to simply relay events, names and places. The thematic concerns of this poetry are rarely beautiful but the words are natural and realistic. Though the poems are confessional, they might not be literal truth. The loss of one object, for example, may be transferred to a fictitious one, though the feelings represented are true. Although beauty and love make their own way into the poem, negative subjects are common as Sexton said in 1968 in an interview, “Pain engraves a deeper memory”. 4 Most importantly the goal of a confessional poet is to move people, using the poet’s experience to stir emotions in the readers who can identify with them. They agree with Franz Kafka’s words, which Sexton inscribed in one of her books, “A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.” 5 ‘The Confessional Poets’ is a new phrase used by the critic M.L. Rosenthal. In his review of Robert Lowell’s Life studies, he states that, “the term confessional poetry came naturally to mind … whoever invented it, it was a term both helpful and too limited, and very possibly the conception of a confessional school has by now done a certain amount of damage.”A deep sense of self-psychological analysis and expression makes a valid stand for every confessional art. Robert Philips observed the significance of such psychic disintegration in confessional art in his book “The Confessional Poets.”He states: “All confessional art whether poetry or not, is a means of killing the beasts which are within us, those dreadful dragons of dreams and experiences that must be hunted down, cornered, and exposed in order to be destroyed.” 6In this way the poetry reveals the concealing facts drawn from the unconscious state of the poets’ inner world. A confessional poet rejects the reality for an alternative and prefers to live as a lost man while the hunt for alternative continues. Like the Roethke’s The Lost Son contains the successiveness of strong confessional notes, while Plath’s love- hate relationship with her father becomes a destructive passion making her a lost daughter. Even Robert Lowell’s quarrel with his family, his predecessors and American culture forced him to be guided by his own sense to object to the situation during the Second World War and subsequently he was an important member of the protest march towards the Pentagon aimed against the Vietnam War during the sixties.Confessional poets are separate and indifferent to established norms. Neither do they revolt nor do they intend to set new principles against the establishment. In his book Crisis and Confession, E.V.Ramkrishnan observes “Because confessional poets are exiles who fail to confirm to the establishment, they do not make definite statement in terms of traditional and cultural values.”7 So the confessional protagonist rejects the fixed myth of perfectibility and casts himself in a role not prescribed by society. The central experience of a confessional poem is psychological which comes through the psychic disintegration in the uncertain condition where the self rejects the established norms. The psychological condition of such poets is treated as maniac –depressive psychosis. The precipitation of such neurosis in poetry is better marked by Karl Malkoff as he suggests, “the work of Lowell, Roethke, Plath, Sexton and others must be placed in the context of not only private confessional poetry, but of the poetry of madness as well.” 8 The secular view of such insanity is also shared by Robert Lowell, who suffered psychological breakdown and was hospitalized in the latter half of his life.The poetic phenomena of twentieth century peculiarly sustain the predilection for psychologizing one’s experience which seems to provide balance on experience and events. Such a confused state of art began in America in 1965, where psychoanalysis became a mode of documentation of reality. This period emphasized the element of uniqueness in the personality of the individual that must be realized “whether through personal mysticism or through political activity or some kind of salvation through artistic activity.” 9 The themes are mostly inspired by the domestic intimacy, crossing all the boundaries. Generally, the places that evoke poetic vision are ordinary like a hospital and an operation theatre, a luggage room or a mental asylum. For example, Roethke writes “Lines on Leaving a Sanatorium” and “Meditations in Hydrotherapy,” Sexton writes “In Celebration of My Uterus” and so on. This poetry appears in open forms, language and in ordinary speech having no barriers of subject matter. The psychic struggle becomes the ground of a reoriented art in which the beset self is the testing ground and the embodiment of all human possibilities – fear, pain, miseries, regrets, vexations and lassitude remain as the proof of one’s existence, the degree of the intensity confirming one’s reality.Sylvia Plath dramatized those moments of crisis during which the self must choose between life and death. With the involvement of violent self- transformation and initiatory change in her works, she sustains the vision of her life, which is enhanced by death. The blinding intensity of the poems written during the last months of her life and the circumstances of her death lend themselves to psychological interpretation to such an extent that it is now difficult for many critics to separate her work from her life. Taking a thematic survey of Plath’s poems one has to admit that her poems are first and foremost carefully constructed texts. If their meaning cannot be reduced to the conscious intentions of their author, it equally cannot be reduced to spirit messages from the unconscious, over which the literary talent has no control. The full meaning of the text lies in the interplay of all its levels and on the terrain of language. These levels are not only personal (conscious and unconscious) but cultural and social deriving from both literary and linguistic tradition and public and collective history.In the case of Sylvia Plath after a phenomenally productive career at Smith College, interrupted for a year because of her mental collapse and nearly accomplished suicide, she won a Fulbright Fellowship to study English literature at Cambridge. In England she met and married the British poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had two children. She fulfilled the demanding and often conflicting roles of mother and wife, poet and critic very well, but seven years after her marriage she committed suicide.Her poetry constitutes a system of symbols that expresses a unified mythic vision; her images may be seen to be emblems of that myth. Red, white and black for example, the characteristics colours in her late poetry, function a mythic emblem of her state of being much as they do in the mythologies, which she drew upon. Much of the tension in her poetry comes from this dilemma; while she does recognize that she is inextricably entangled in her social matrix, and in her society’s definition of her, which she never accepts, but continues to struggle. This disparity between the recognition and the acceptance of limitations is perhaps the basis both for the ambiguity of her vision and increasingly surrealistic quality of her images. From sometime in late 1960 onwards, she began increasingly to image her world as made up of walls-she does so literally in “Apprehensions” (1962) and visualizes herself, in reflection, as fossilized. Her search for true self or to redefine comes up against the rigidity of social conventions in the form of poetry which reflects her suffocation and entrapment. Julia Kristeva remarks: “In woman’s writing, language seems to be seen from a foreign land…Estranged from language, women are visionaries, dancers who suffer as they speak.” 10As a true artist she had the spontaneous sensational creative flow till the moments of her depression and even subsequent suicide. Born on 27th October 1932, as the first child of two German speaking intellectuals: Dr. Otto Plath, Professor Biology at Boston University and Aurelia Schober, who met Otto Plath while studying for her master’s degree in German. Otto Plath had immigrated at the age of sixteen to America from Grabow, a town in the Polish Corridor. Aurelia Schober taught English in a school for a year and then returned to the University for a master ’s degree in English and German. She registered for the German course under Otto Plath. They became good friends and finally got married in January 1932. Their daughter Sylvia was born in the same year and the son, Warren in 1935. In 1936, the Plaths shifted from Jamaica to Massachusetts where the Schobers’ lived close by at Point Shirley. The physical condition of Otto Plath started deteriorating, but he stubbornly refused to consult a doctor, with drawing more and more into himself. Aurelia Plath took care of two children alone. Sylvia spent a lot of time with her grandparents especially her grandfather and grew much attached to him. He acted as a surrogate father to her. This account for the fusion of identities that take place in her work the father sometimes appears as the grandfather and the grandfather is often called father.In early childhood, Sylvia was the center of her father’s attention, while her brother Warren a sickly afflicted with asthma and bronchitis, absorbed most of his mother’s time. Almost all Sylvia’s childhood writings reflect the Horatio Alger ethic of the era: happiness is the right of everyone, to be achieved through hard work; success is the reward for work; and fame and money are the measure of success. It was the philosophy Sylvia imbibed at school as well as at home and as well as throughout her life. The death of her father Otto Plath on 5 November, 1940 due to acute diabetes mellitus came as a shock to her. After the death of Otto Plath, Mrs. Plath settled down in a small house in Wellesley, a suburb of Boston, selling off their Winthrop house. She was eight then and they “ moved away from the sea which dramatically sealed him in a moonstruck, glassed in compartment of Sylvia’s imagination, where he evolved into his God like/devil like manifestations, stripped of reality, the frightening ghost of a father she had scarcely known as a healthy man. Eventually, the poet in Sylvia reduced that time to a figure in a delicately constructed work of art, a ship in a bottle, described at the end of her radio script ‘Ocean 1212 – W’ in 1962: “beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.”11 She had colossal admiration and deep faith in her father and in his inaccessibility, and now her love and need for him ran to a desperate bid. She felt uncannily attracted towards death because that is how she could join her father and get rid off the wearing demands of a pressurized life. Her father is present as an unavoidable deity in her poetry, directly or indirectly.She had to compensate for all these mishaps by studying hard, crossing all academics hurdles successfully, winning prizes and scholarships. Her entire academic career projects a pure and perfect American teenager whose only motto was winning. She kept her façade so beautifully tidied up that not a tremor of the dark self was visible. Along the process of evolution, thus, her personality takes a definite but terrible turn where she is left alone with the dark doubts and problems of her troubled self, and which finds its way ultimately in the terrible self- searching poetry that she writes. There was a peculiar passion and drive in her all the time, whether she was studying hard to win a full scholarship to Smith or engaging herself remorselessly in her writing. Perseverance was a close associate of her passion. The urge would not let her rest until she poured out her feelings honestly:There is a voice within meThat will not be still. (Letters Home)Plath concentrated on winning scholastic awards maintaining the ‘A’ standards during her junior high school years. She wrote rhymes, drew sketches to accompany them and contributed regularly to the school magazine with a spirit of her unleashing creativity. In 1947 she started her study in Bradford High School. Her interest in creative writing was greatly encouraged by her English teacher, Mr. Crockett. In a long unpublished poem she admits that she was greatly motivated by a significant urge to write:You ask me why I spend my life writing.… … … …I write only becauseThere is a voice within meThat will not be still. This dynamic voice stemmed inherently from the urge to create something new inspired her throughout her life. In the editorial comments on Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home, Aurelia Plath recalls that it was at this time that Sylvia Plath realized that:… her exuberant joyous outbursts in both poetry and prose brought rejection slips, while the story or poemwith pathetic twist was found more acceptable. Morepeople would identify with the plain heroine beset withdoubts and difficulties. The old adage to get your hero up a tree, throw stones at him, then let him extricatehimself still held true at this time. Advice andexperience in regard to writing led her now into an examination and analysis of the darker recesses of self. Sylvia Plath started her study in Smith College on a scholarship from Olive Higgins Prouty. She proved herself worthy enough for such financial aid. Her story “Sunday at the Mintons” was published in “Mademoiselle” in 1952 and the next year she was appointed as a guest editor by “Mademoiselle”, where she spent a month in New York interviewing the important writers. Her brief stay in the New York City became the turning point of her life, as she could not reconcile with the prospect of spending the remaining dull, seemingly endless summer at home. Her mother hints, “she spent the rest of the summer in a state of depression: at times she would pour out endless streams of self-deprecation and self-recrimination.”12 After coming back from New York, she heard the news of refusal to her entry at Snow Story Writing class at Harvard Summer School, which she was looking forward to. Her dark self thus took over on that fateful day of Aug 24, 1953 and she committed suicide: Death was worth it,But I Have a self,Discover, a queenIs she dead. Ariel, 61.The feeling of dejection and nothingness took over her and finally led her to commit suicide. She took an overdose of sleeping pills hiding herself in the basement. However, on the third day she was found and rushed to the hospital for electro convulsive therapy and psychotherapy. She describes this suicidal attempt vividly in her book The Bell Jar. Though she got recovered completely, but this psychological jolt became the germination of a new seed of her creativity in the later years.Thinking of suicide became her way of living and writing. Whenever she was engulfed by the overpowering emotions of loss and uncertainty she wanted to quit; of course, after transforming it into beautiful verses. This certainly is the escapist attitude which snuggled side by side her courageous challenging attitude to life. This is the mystery and beauty of her dual personality. Once she wrote to her mother about a ‘suicidal girl’ who wanted to commit suicide because she thought herself incapable of fulfilling all the demands and desires of her parents. This imaginary girl was none other than she; but mother did not understand her situation and wrote back that the girl in question was certainly not suicidal. Actually she was imploring for help to her mother to understand her situation, begging for the allowance to relax. She did rush to her mother for help whenever in distress, but Mrs. Plath didn’t understand the gravity of her daughter’s predicament, which her daughter wanted so badly.In 1954, she was readmitted at Smith. Having lost a year, she was now doubly determined to do exceptionally well, to “fight” to “overcome one by one all the hurdles.”13 She was in command again of herself, and the world around her, putting on more sophisticated marks to adjust her different selves. She was prudish enough in her heart of hearts. In spite of her showy candour about sex, she cared a lot, or rather was obsessed with the feeling of inherent innocence and purity, as her poems also disclose. And thus she met the balding, myopic, pervert young man whom Nancy Sterner while writing on A Memory of Sylvia Plath (1973) describes in her memoir so repugnantly, and by whom she was raped eventually. This unusual incisive insight on her part rendered a black pessimistic shade to her personality. This also tells us her indomitable search for true love and healthy sex. After rape incident she did not sit back in grim passivity, withdrawn to herself as was expected, but plunged head long in the course of dating men at Harvard and Yale with a vengeance. To her, each was a new specimen to look over and cancel, not fitting her eligibility features. She tried to come, to terms with another angular facet of her personality but she failed. So, it is not surprising that sex is almost absent in her poetry- either yearning of it or the fulfilment of it. This adherence to strict morality is yet another feature of her personality which often shocked her friends with her easy, outgoing, bickering attitude about sex. Each and every friend and contemporary at Smith, however, insists that there was no trace of melancholy in her, instead she was bubbling with life’s enormous vigour always: “Laughter breaking through her conversation like an overflowing fountain.”14 She kept reminding herself that she just couldn’t afford to waste time and energy, as the big life is passing away. It shows the restlessness of her spirit of doing something new.

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